Don't know how to describe it, but I've had college friends make fun of how I say some words. I sometimes "eat" letters or truncate words, apparently. I'm afraid to sound uneducated or unable to pronounce some words right. Here, I pronounce three things that I have issues with. The first is how I pronounce it normally and the second how I feel I "should" pronounce them but takes more effort and doesn't feel "natural" to me. They are: "Washington, D.C.," "Louisiana," and "pretty nice. ####### | Voice message Do y'all ever have issues with some words? Are there any ways to fix this, say, repetition? I don't have an accent so it might be more of the way I learned to say some words. I just don't want to sound like a lazy guy who can't enunciate words properly.
I have this problem too. Those who hear me often enough always say that I need to stop mumbling. Additionally, I stammer... I find speaking slower and pronouncing the words more distinctly helps.
I have a similar problem. I have to consciously enunciate most of my words (which has led to an odd accent) in order not to have my sentences dissipate into garbled nonsense. It's not just some words, it's for my whole speech. I also have to vary in styles of pronunciation; some words I can't easily say like a normal Australian, so I use a different way to say it. As for fixing them, you could find tongue-twisters with similar sounds and practice the words which particularly bother you; it might help a little. Including them in varying, realistic sentences so that it becomes natural to say it is a good idea.
Thinking + talking is too hard for me, I always swallow words if I talk too fast or too excited/nervous >.> EDIT: solution - talk slower ^^
I do this too, to the point where people have no clue what I'm talking about cause I 'ate' half the sentence... :lol:
Even for us Midwestern folk, who are said to speak English straight out of the dictionary, still eat letters. Here in Michigan, you get your driver's license from the Secretaria State.
And I have spent my whole life in the "Mwaukee" area (well, we have other linguistic quirks as well. Like, we never go "to" anything, we always seem to go "down by". "I'm going down by Grandma for Christmas.") I still slip into the local vernacular from time to time, but generally I overcame it by making a point to listen to myself talk. We really don't actively listen to ourselves. If you do (and take that split second to actually concentrate on what you are saying, and how you're saying it--which is a bitch, let me tell you!), it eventually becomes a habit.
I kind of get it. Sometimes a word will have an accent apart from the rest of the sentence. Like sha'ar for shower. Same for flour/flower. Not always, but sometimes.
Somewhere I picked up a sort of dialect that no one else in my are/country/continent/planet seems to have. Not only that but I have my local dialect on top of it which is avoiding pronouncing "Ts" near at all. The way that I speak "normal" when I have to is I just identify what the accent does to my speech, and find a way to counter-act that. It is pretty hard to pick up/ drop an accent, I'm sure your friends have their own speaking quirks
It sounds as though your mouth isn't moving enough when you speak. We were all forced to play those annoying phonetic and consonant games in elementary school. This is why we can always pronounce things correctly when we make a conscious effort to; however, many of us eventually start becoming lazy when it comes to proper pronunciation throughout our day-to-day lives. The only way to improve how you mouth moves subconsciously is to make a conscious effort to correct it as frequently as you can. Try to force yourself to move your mouth more whenever you can remember in a conversation. Although some people in society would consider it crazy, good public speakers frequently think aloud to themselves in private. In an intellectual sense thinking aloud rather than strictly in one's head causes more stimulation of the mind because putting our thoughts into words is much more difficult and requires far more thought that allowing ourselves to brush off clarity and continuity, as we often do when we think briefly. Similar to the idea of getting a better grasp on concepts through explaining them to others; only in a more broader sense than just academic topics.
